1. Field of the Invention
The invention relates to the field of communications. More specifically, the invention relates to transmission over communication networks.
2. Background of the Invention
Various scheduling methods are used to support various levels of service. These services fall into one of two categories: priority based schedulers and round robin schedulers. A priority based scheduler always transmits the highest priority packets in one of its queues. A round robin scheduler transmits packets from each nonempty connection queue (“An Engineering Approach to Computer Networking”, Kehsav, p. 236 (1997)). A weighted round robin scheduler transmits packets from each nonempty connection queue in proportion to each queue's “weight”.
Unfortunately, higher priority packets can starve out lower priority traffic with a priority based scheduler. With a weighted round robin scheduler, low latency traffic may need to wait for an entire round (more than one packet transmission time) before being transmitted.
A method and apparatus for traffic scheduling is described. In one embodiment, a priority scheme is combined with a generalized processor sharing scheme to schedule transmission of a set of data and the set of data is transmitted as scheduled.